Will Self may not have been too pleased with the reviews of his novel, How the Dead Live (Bloomsbury £15.99), but there was one consolation: Julie Burchill, in her reliably crazed Guardian column, announced to the world that she no longer fancied him.

"To get the full clout of this," she explained, "you've got to understand what Will Self represented, sexually, in the 90s. Despite his drug and alcohol intake, to us London media babes he was a sexual icon packing the oomph of Jimi Hendrix, Robbie Williams and Gordon Brown all rolled into one. Every man wanted to be him and every woman wanted to have him. They usually did, too."

Burchill picked up on the rebranding of Self ("no more the junkie stud, instead the funky dad"), which was seen to best effect in Lynn Barber's interview with him in theObserver. The Demon Barber's vitriol was kept firmly in its bottle. "Normally, he would celebrate the delivery of a manuscript by going on a bender," she cooed. "This time he took his seven-year-old daughter to buy presents in Hamleys."

Self, not surprisingly, used the interview to tell us how good the book was: "I didn't get any sense of completion until I was very near the end, when suddenly I could look back and see that it was working. But up till then I was in the dark wood."

Unfortunately, Adam Mars-Jones, who reviewed the book for the same paper, found it entirely wooden. "It may seem a perverse criticism of a book like How the Dead Live to say that it lacks vitality. But a book about fish doesn't have scales and a book about death needs a pulse as much as any other, perhaps more than most." (The book is narrated by a dead woman called Lily Bloom and deals, in part, with an area called Dulston, the centre of what Elaine Showalter in the Guardian called "necropolitan" London and home to an animated spirit community.)

Mars-Jones, along with most critics, admired the ambition but attacked the execution. "At the heart of the novel is a desire to tackle big themes and extreme situations, coupled with an absolute unwillingness to risk being uncool. The tone is one of unvarying contempt... a dutiful nihilism which over hundreds of pages becomes mysteriously vanilla for lack of anything to contrast with it."

Tom Deverson, in the Sunday Times, was even more combative. His opening set the tone: "It takes more than average chutzpah to write a long novel in which peregrinations around a city are interspersed with literary allusions, inner monologues, phantasmagoric episodes, mythological references, a funeral and daytime sex - and to call your main character Bloom. But then nobody would accuse Will Self of literary modesty."

It got worse: "The verbal excess is a thin would-be impressive membrane over an inner tissue of more commonplace commentary. There are incidentally interesting thoughts, such as the affinity of addicts with the dying, both of whom 'operate within tiny windows of temporal opportunity'. There are brief moments of enchanting imaginative transformation, as when Lily's duvet pattern dissolves into the grid of Manhattan. But more frequently, the look-at-me-mum metaphors and the compulsive alliteration are striking without being enlightening."

Robert Hanks, in the Daily Telegraph, also thought the book showy and chaotic: "Self's creative consciousness seems to have become a no-go area for the forces of law and order, the mental equivalent of a really rough inner-city estate... The ingenuity and moral depth detectable in parts of the book only make its overall failure more frustrating.

"Self's gifts as a writer are undeniable; they shriek from every page. But he is a talent entirely without discipline or discrimination. The book is packed with puns, assonances and alliterations; polysyllables, jargon and slang run amok; metaphors and similes blunder about, crashing into one another. After the first 40 pages, I was ready to give in, to say:'All right, Self, you're bloody marvellous. Now can't you just shut up and leave me alone?' But no, he keeps on going for another 360 pages."

Katie Owen, in the Sunday Telegraph, found similar faults, but was a good deal more forgiving. "The unruliness and extravagance of Self's writing is both his strength and his failing. His exorbitant imagination is stimulating, his word-play dazzling, but in his longer fiction he seems carried away by his own powers, his satirical effect blunted. Here, his enthusiastic elaboration of the dead way of life becomes long-winded, its deliberately challenging grotesquerie reduced to absurdity. For all these faults, however, this is Will Self's strongest and most moving novel so far, and Lily Bloom his most complex and memorable character."

Elaine Showalter, writing in the Guardian, also sought to accentuate the positives: "What How the Dead Live lacks in economy and structure, it repays in lavishness of feeling and characterisation. Lily is a colossal heroine, a night-town Molly Bloom... What begins as a satiric novel of ideas ends as a surprisingly moving elegy." But she rather weakened her case by saying that the plot and chronology were almost impossible to understand. ("There is a lot for the reader to sort out in this ambitious but often confusing narrative," was her more polite formulation.)

But there was one other source of succour for Self, apart from the fact that Burchill is no longer in hot pursuit of his body - the rave review that Mark Sanderson gave the novel in the London Evening Standard. No quibbles or clenched-teeth plaudits for flawed ambition here.

"How the Dead Live is the work of a novelist writing at the height of his powers,"said Sanderson. "It is a horror story, a love-me-do story, a full-frontal assault on the seven deadly sins - and a celebration of them. Lily may be an old cow, but she's good company. Whether attacking combat trousers, mirror-clad buildings or Steven Spielberg, she hits where it hurts and the result is hilariously shocking. Self's verbal fireworks are fuelled by real anger and grief. Life may be grotty but he has proved that literature can still be great." A reviewer in ecstasy is a rare thing indeed.